Among the many things that have been changed by the internet during our lifetime, the change in our shopping habits has been one of the biggest ones. Like the effects of the internet on many aspects of daily life ensuring ease and comfort, the ease of finding and shopping products with the help of online stores has been a prominent one. A small brick and mortar store can build its online store by hiring an e-commerce dedicated developer india and connecting its target consumers or you can go specific according to targeted technology like you can Hire Certified Magento Developers or for shopify or woocommerce.
Even e-commerce has not been stranded in the same place. It continued to evolve at a faster pace and over the decades the evolution of Ecommerce store development has incorporated a great many features and elements that were unthinkable previously.
Some of the key paradigm shifting changes that occurred to e-commerce in recent years include mobile app based stores taking over traditional web stores, the integration of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, chatbot based customer service, omnichannel marketing bringing online and offline stores closer, etc.
Here are some of the most crucial trends that are at the forefront of this change in e-commerce. For any eCommerce development company, these trends show the opportunities that they can capitalise on their e-commerce projects.
Mobile Commerce Is Taking Over
Based on average statistics, every adult now spends around 5 hours everyday on mobile devices. 50% of this time spent on mobile devices belongs to social media uses, messaging, and entertainment apps. This shows how much the common consumers are dependent on mobile devices.Slowly the retail companies started to understand the importance of this increasing mobile engagement of the consumers. Resultantly, they started to come up with more and more mobile campaigns. Naturally, this type of mobile focused marketing has totally replaced the traditional marketing approaches and made consumers happier and more engaged with brands. Consumers instead of avoiding business messages like with the traditional ads, are engaging more and even turning into brand ambassadors.
Increasing number of people are now purchasing using their smartphones and even while making purchases from a brick and mortar store in their locality they are using mobile devices for payment, catching offers and for location aware messages. Thanks to mobile devices retail marketing is becoming more context aware and hyper local than ever before.
Emergence Of Social Commerce
Launched way back in 2010, in the space of a decade Instagram became one of the most dominant social platforms with too many influencers and brands continuously benefiting each other and reaching a wider audience. Having more than 1 billion active users for every month, Instagram became the face of social media brand promotion and marketing now.As the leading social media platform Instagram is now enjoying the biggest influence on the ecommerce retail sector. Following the success of Instagram, every major social media channel boasts of an ecommerce marketplace with too many brands and influencers interacting with the users.
On top of all these, digital marketing now made space for the brands to advertise their products or service offerings on the diverse social channels in a more user centric and targeted manner. The impact has been a serious one on the ecommerce industry with a wide number of purchasing options for consumers.
Mobile And Digital Wallets
The great stumbling block before the widespread acceptance of the e-commerce sector was the lack of trust, especially in regard to the security vulnerabilities for online transactions. Even just a decade ago, consumers used to visit physical retail stores instead of going for online purchases just due to the lack of trust corresponding to ecommerce transactions.But since then, the condition changed a lot and now we have mobile and digital wallets allowing consumers to make safe online transactions and online payments for their purchases.
The digitization of the payment processing has ensured seamless and easy transactions for all online purchases irrespective of the value. The digital wallets emerged as one of the path breaking introductions for the entire e-commerce industry. Now, digital wallets and mobile wallets are being used widely across multitude of online stores.
Apart from ensuring optimum security, digital wallet and mobile wallet solutions are also helping the online stores to minimise the instances of abandoned carts as consumers can make easy instant payment through the stores.
Increasing Volume Of Voice Search
According to the forecast of Loop Ventures around 75% of U.S. homes by 2025 are going to have a smart speaker. Increasing number of people tend to depend on voice assistants such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri whether while using mobile phones or smart speakers and they are using voice commands for everything including finding web content, searching for a YouTube video or for shopping and browsing products online.So, voice search is picking up as a major trend in the e-commerce stores across the niches and sizes and this is going to continue for the years to come. As more and more people are having smart speakers or as increasing number of people are going to find voice commands for all sorts of tasks, voice commands are likely to take over e-commerce.
AI Powered Personalisation
The biggest challenge for the brick-and-mortar stores while facing online stores is the way intelligent personalised recommendations are helping the later to garner more sales.The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies allowed retailers a completely new and precision driven way to target customers. Simply thanks to the data driven insights about individual customers, delivering a more personalised shopping experience now became possible.
AI helps online businesses learn about the customers more precisely and accordingly ensure recommendations and supply of products that are likely to fulfill their demands. Thanks to the AI powered data driven insights the shopping experience of customers can be enhanced to a great extent. AI can also help automating many tasks to ensure better customer service.
Chatbots Enhancing Online Shopping Experience
At the centre of all personalization and AI driven intelligent capabilities remains the engaging chatbot communication that appears impersonating the avatar of store attendant. Chatbots allow online stores to guide and help thousands of customers while never missing the personal touch and attention that customers always want from store attendants.Most importantly, while serving customers chatbots always make recommendations and offer solutions based on specific data-driven customer insights and thus increases the chance of satisfaction and business conversion. The success of chatbots as a lasting component in the online stores depends also on the huge popularity among shoppers who prefer to communicate with bots for faster product searches and checkout processes.
Augmented Reality For Enhanced Shopping Experience
Augmented Reality (AR) emerged as a groundbreaking element in the online shopping arena and continued to help customer’s buying decisions. Thanks to AR consumers can visualise and experience the look and feel of the products from closer as the gap between real-life viewing and remote viewing gets closer.Across online stores, not being able to see products properly is considered to be a major pulling factor for sales. This is where Augmented Reality with its close to reality visuals and interactive abilities can help customers make buying decisions faster.
